The Independent Developer Shall…

This PPT by Greg Costikyan is from his keynote at a German games conference last month. It’s got some nice economic analysis, and some nice *hope*: internet speed has caught up with game size, so internet distribution can support more game development business models that it did 5 years ago.

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How to build your own gaming computer

If you were motivated by Professor Olano’s recent post on games that require high-end machines to, here’s a site for you — Learn How to Build Your Own Gaming Computers. It covers all aspects of assembling a computer optimized for gaming. Building your own box or upgrading your current one can save you money as well as give you hands on experience with current hardware technology.

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Sims creator Will Wright: Video games do no harm to children

The British Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture Media and Sport have commissioned an independent report on the effects of violent games and the Internet on children. The effort is lead by Tanya Byron, a British psychologist and TV personality. The study has a web site where people can enter their views.

Today’s Guardian has an interview with Sims creator Will Wright that focuses on the same issues:

Q: We’ve just started a government review in the UK into the affect of games on children. Do you think attitudes are starting to be a shift?

Wright: I think there’s always been a generational divide between people who play games and people who don’t. As people get older you see more and more parents that played games as they were kids now playing games with their kids. In some sense I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology. As you get a broader set of people playing games, you get a broader set of games to appeal to those people. I think that’s the slow, inevitable process going on here. It goes in fits and starts over time – if there’s a school shooting, it’s a case of ‘did they play games or not’: you don’t really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read. But 50 years ago that’s exactly what you heard, did they read To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever it is. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand. (link)

There’s lots more in the interview, including Wright talking about what games he plays.

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Second Life and education

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a Live Discussion on Getting an Academic Life in Second Life.

“Colleges around the world are opening virtual campuses in Second Life, a three-dimensional, colorful environment that can be accessed via a computer. One of those campuses is New Orleans Island, which was built by Merrill L. Johnson, an administrator at the University of New Orleans. What is the appeal of Second Life, and what kind of classes does the university hold there? Is Second Life a useful distance- education platform or just frivolous entertainment? Mr. Johnson will answer those and other questions.”

In the same theme, the Chronicle also has an article on Educators Get New Spot for Second Life Initiation.

“Realizing that Orientation Island doesn’t fit the needs of many educators, the New Media Consortium, a higher-education technology group, has unveiled its own orientation island for newbies. The place has a San Francisco ambiance, in homage to Linden Lab’s headquarters: An open-air market, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a trolley car are among the sights. Kinks remain to be worked out. But the island is more colorful and informative than Linden Lab’s version. Particularly helpful is the “Pier of Culture,” which discusses, among other things, griefers (disruptive avatars), machinima (video production in Second Life), and poseballs (objects that animate avatars who sit on them). Such wisdom usually takes many months for users to discover on their own.”

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Brain-Computer interface for Second Life

Researchers at the Tomita and Ushida Laboratory of Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that allows a person to control a Second Life avatar just by thinking.

“The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle.” (link)

The range of functions supported is still limited, but are planning to support more complex movements and geatures.

The motivation is not to make your couch potato’s life even easier, but to develop the technology to “help people with serious physical impairments communicate and do business in Second Life.”

Here’s a video demonstrating mind control of a Second Life avatar.

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Top ten tech challenges for game developers

Popular Science identifies the top ten technical challenges facing
game developers today.

“Today’s videogames draw on sophisticated science like biomechanics, fluid dynamics and computational geometry to be lifelike and exciting. Here are the 10 greatest challenges of making them. See for yourself—it’s virtual reality, but it’s real work”. (link)

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Randy Pausch’s last lecture

The farewell lecture by CMU graphics Professor Randy Pausch that Marc Olano blogged about earlier today is now available on you tube.

It’s hard to watch without feeling an ache.

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Game Education giant Randy Pausch gives farewell lecture at CMU

Randy Pausch got the notice of the graphics community by building a virtual reality system on the super-cheap with off-the-shelf components, then doing real user-study based experiments with it to tell which VR methods worked and which didn’t. He got the notice of the computer science community with Alice, a scripted 3D animation program to teach introductory programming. And, he got the notice of the games industry by founding the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has been a Professor of Computer Science for the past ten years.

Recently, he learned that the pancreatic cancer he has been fighting for the past year is back, and incurable. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an excellent story on his farewell lecture at CMU Tuesday.

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12 year old gets $6.5M for gaming company

When I saw this on Slashdot this morning I had to check the calendar to see if it was April first and the link to make sure it wasn’t a story from the Onion.

“A Silicon Valley company co-founded by a 12-year-old has just raised $6.5 million in venture capital. PlaySpan, based in Santa Clara, Calif. says it offers game publishers a technology that lets users make payments and shop for other items. It calls itself the first “publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network.” Arjun Mehta, a 6th grader, says on his Web site that he is passionate about software that can make the game experience more “rewarding,” and that he started the company last year in his garage. He paid for it from earnings made from selling online game items he won.” (link)

PlaySpan’s web site says that it is “based in Silicon Valley with offices in Mumbai and Shanghai.” While I don’t doubt Arjun’s role as some sort of “founder”, he’s surely a figurehead at this point. I mean, what would happen to the company if your chief executive had to take a week off to finish his big science fair project? Well, maybe he has people who do that kind of stuff for him these days. Having him as your designated “founder” certainly is good for publicity, in any case.

Update (9/20): Akshay points us to an item on VentureBeat on this. Check on the first comment: “The story about 12 year old co-founder is a big oversell…I know because I broke the story on funding two days ago. The CEO Karl Mehta and Arjun’s dad is the real guy behind it…arjun just came up with part of the idea for it, and is not really involved with the business per se. Arjun’s mention on the site is a gimmick which will be rectified soon…the release doesn’t mention him and for good reason.“

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Oldskool: King of Kong

King of Kong is a new documentary on the world of competitive arcade video machine players. It tells the story of the quest by Steve Wiebe, a middle school science teacher, to beat the record for the top score in Donkey Kong, one that was set over 25 years ago by Billy Mitchell. Steve, based in Seattle and Billy, out of Hollywood Florida, have a continent between them, but also between their approach to the game and life. Steve’s sweet family man persona is contrasted with Billy’s man-in-black WWF villainous image. It’s quite a story.

The movie is still in limited release, but is playing at The Charles in Baltimore and E street cinema in DC. The uniformly positive reviews caught my attention and I get a chance to see it tonight. I was not disappointed. It’s a great movie, teling an inspirational story about human values against a backdrop of retro video gaming.

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